MART: Glitch Digital Arts festival 2015

30th May – 6th June in both The MART Gallery and Rua Red

/Glitch 2015

Curated by MART's Ciara Scanlan + Matthew Nevin

The Glitch Digital Arts festival in 2015, is an annual festival that brings together leading media and technology artists, curators, researchers, and artist groups with audiences to explore emerging and established contemporary cultural and critical issues that arise from artists intersection and investigations with digital technology.

This years Glitch will bridge the gap between space and place, we would like to invite YOU to become active participants on a journey to trigger movement/light/communication in the artworks through this interactive digital festival.

We no longer need to stop and ask directions; a digital map leads us to the door of our destination, ‘Street View’ walks us through places we may never go and the idea of letter writing is obsolete. We are the last generation that will remember a time without internet and recall fondly the old clumsy sound of the ‘dial up’ tone.

Political investigations, social media campaigns, obsession with HD technology versus the trend in retro technology, all these technological advancements in recent decades have pushed society in various directions. The future of technology and digital media is boundless. It has the ability to open borders, break silences from oppressed countries and expose the truth. But this double edged sword also hides lies, disturbing realities and shelters networks for corruption and perversion.

The positive drive of technology overrides any failures or mishaps – from video buffering to the misalignment of Galileo Satellites, our culture and reliance on technology is evolving. Mainstream media outlets and commercial entities continue to utilise the growth of new technologies to their gain; capturing/enabling/controlling audiences to act in concise preprogrammed ways.

Through /Glitch 2015 the curators have chosen to open up the question “How can technology be used to disarm our notion of a place in space ….. a place people may never go?” to a series of established and emerging Irish/international artists.

The artists are encouraged to sample/experiment with both older and new technologies to comment on the use of technologies influence on space, reassessing what it is to be both local and yet hold an inter/national spatial autonomy. The Curators/Artists will produce contemporary artwork that utilises mainstream technology/media to open a discourse on ‘our’ relationship with new/old technologies.